The following post is an editorial opinion from Joe Hadsall. His views do not reflect the views of Ellusionist.com Inc. Flame him, not E.

I had a great plan tonight. I was going to do a post about all the great April Fool’s Day pranks done by magicians, and at the end, make our own April Fool’s Day offering official.

In fact, let’s do that now: There is no hidden contest on the back of our Arcane playing cards. Justin Erickson is an E customer who I contacted last night on a whim. Like a champ, Justin sent a picture and some great ideas about Pokemon, and that led to this post. We’re sending him a little something for his work today. Unfortunately, it’s not worth anywhere near $10,000. Sooo… APRIL FOOLS!

Which brings me to the rest of the magic community: Where were you?

By my count, and I could be missing something here, only Barry and Stuart offered up some pranks. I searched up and down the Net, but couldn’t find anything about magicians pulling pranks. Sure, tech-geeks had a crazy day today, especially in Topeka, Kan. But magicians — the crowd best equipped to pull some great pranks — were nowhere in my searches.

Even iTricks came up empty. Editor Justin Robert Young, who rocks the house and constantly churns out great magic news and interviews, could find only a 2-year-old Rickroll and a 30-second backroom video about mail order brides or something like that.

This is supposed to be about fun. No one is going to really believe anything controversial on April 1. Britain knows that; you can tell by their newspapers today. There will never be another Sidd Finch. So why not have fun with it, even if everyone knows an “April Fools” is coming?

Besides, we all need a laugh. The economy is shaky, politics are maddening, dogmatic and pedantic, everyone’s worried about inflation and job security and there’s wars going on around the world. People need a little more fun in their lives, and we magicians are some of the perfect people to deliver that needed entertainment.

Back to our prank: I knew Justin would be a good fit for it, but I had no idea how perfect until I read a note he posted on his Facebook page. Apparently, his day was crazy. People contacted him on Twitter and asked how to break the code. He got blog posts about him and had friends congratulate him. All of a sudden, he had to put on more of a charade than he expected. His assessment of the day: “All in all, no $10,000. But, this will go down in my life as one of the best days ever.”

Justin gets what today’s April Fool’s Day is all about. You can read his note here. Right here. Go ahead and click. You know what’s gonna happen, but you’re going to click anyway. That’s why I linked to the VH-1 Pop Up Video version, because that version is at least interesting.

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